Irish conductor and pianist David Brophy arrived with a bang in Cologne, his new musical home, last October.
With Mise Éire – Seán Ó Riada’s soaring and searching score for the 1959 documentary – Brophy presented his calling card as a proud northside Dubliner and new principal conductor with Cologne’s WDR Funkhaus orchestra.
It’s a prominent position for the 52-year-old and, four months in, Brophy is still buzzing from the musical cocktails he is helping to mix and serve on the banks of the Rhine.
“It’s very quickly become a home from home and, though it’s still the honeymoon period, it all seems to be a good fit,” he says.
The WDR orchestra is one of Germany’s most popular and a perfect home for Brophy, who describes himself as a “perpetual magpie”: happy to flit around and borrow music from everywhere.
That could bring problems with many orchestras in Germany, where fixed ideas persist of “E” or serious (Ernst) music and “U” entertainment (Unterhaltung) music.
Like the RTÉ concert orchestra Brophy headed for seven years as principal conductor, his new WDR ensemble operates largely in the “light” musical tradition but can easily flip to “serious” orchestral music.
In many ways Brophy is following the Duke Ellington musical tradition. In 1962 the celebrated band leader and composer wrote: “There are simply two kinds of music: good music and the other kind.”
Ellington wasn’t the first artist to think that way. A century earlier in 1856, Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer mocked “parrot-like” critics whose obsession with labels makes them “overlook the real genres: good and bad”.
Celebrating his new job over pints in a Cologne Irish pub, orchestra members told Brophy that his confident versatility was why they chose him.
One musician – perhaps on the second, or third pint – jokingly described him as an “eierlegende Vollmichsau”.
Its direct translation – an “egg-laying wool-and-milk sow” makes less sense than its looser translation: they view Brophy as a rare breed or a jack-of-all-trades, open to all sorts of music, energy and communication.
Brophy hasn’t disappointed in his concert programmes to date, mixing Danny Boy, Felix Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture and ABBA’s Waterloo.
His audience are thrilled and, to their own surprise, so are the German critics.
“Mendelssohn’s overture delighted with both a clear dramaturgy of the core motive, an elegant line reading and a clear melodic charm,” wrote the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger newspaper recently. “While Waterloo stood out through its drive, energy and instrumental sheen. In short: an inspiring groove.”
Brophy’s early musical groove was more rock than orchestras. He was raised in Santry, opposite what is today Dublin City University, his weeks punctuated by Saturday bike rides down to Bull Island at Dollymount to play golf, his passion since he was a boy of 10.
He studied music at Dublin Institute of Technology and Trinity College. After further studies in England and the Netherlands, and private conducting lessons, he was appointed apprentice conductor with Chamber Choir Ireland and assistant conductor with the RTÉ – now National – Symphony Orchestra.
Brophy is perhaps best known to Irish audiences for founding the High Hopes Choir, comprising people affected by homelessness, first featured in an RTÉ documentary a decade ago.
His CV bursts with collaborations with big musical names, too, including Tasmin Little, Lesley Garret and Daniel Hope, as well as some prominent “sirs”: Ireland’s James Galway and Willard White. He is in demand as a conductor from Pittsburgh to Finland, yet Brophy still sees himself as a homebird.
“I’ve not had one of those careers where every second week I’m going somewhere else. I’ve been very rooted in Ireland,” says Brophy. Despite his busy current schedule, he insists he is no rush to get anywhere or chase anything.
“I don’t have a website, I don’t do social media, and if next Thursday were my last concert ever, I could live with that,” he says. “Conducting is a pursuit involving lifelong learning. You only become competent when you’re 60.”
I know so many musicians struggling in Ireland who live with their parents and say ‘I could play a wedding and earn twice as much as playing with the NSO’
Brophy is eight years shy of that, and, as he enters his conducting prime, he is looking forward to a more relaxed pace in Cologne.
In Ireland he was used to two rehearsals and a sound check on the day of the concert. The WDR orchestra approach is different with up to six days of morning rehearsals.
“It gives me time to work on sound with the orchestra, which I wouldn’t normally do,” he says. “But I don’t want an orchestra to peak too soon, I want them at 90 per cent in rehearsals and to get to 100 per cent in the concert.”
His late arrival to so-called classical music has, he thinks, left him open to all musical directions and forms, with little time for cultural elitism. In Cologne, his first season includes a Shaun the Sheep family concert and a Baroque-to-Beatles evening.
“I think elitism is okay – I want the best pilot or surgeon – but I’m not okay with exclusionary elitism,” he says. “You see it if someone walks into the opera with a particular kind of earrings, or an older person turns heads at a Beyoncé concert in their tweeds. The world is complex and the best way to celebrate that is to include as many people.”
Which brings us to Ireland and his concerns about where the country is going – and those it is excluding.
Ulysses is littered with working-class Dubs who know about Mozart’s operas. My grandad, a blue-collar Dub, knew the Chopin Military Polonaises
A decade ago, when High Hopes Choir featured in an RTÉ documentary, Ireland had 3,738 registered homeless and declared it a national emergency. Before Christmas, the homeless number neared 15,000. And this in the land where, in the same decade, corporate tax receipts have increased almost sevenfold.
“I don’t think any lessons have been learned since the crash,” says Brophy, “because I don’t think those in charge see a correlation between homelessness and high property prices.”
For all of Ireland’s recent exponential development in many fields, he sees a chronic lack of debate about the kind of country Ireland is becoming, and why all this new money has yet to make a noticeable impact on public funding of, and access to, culture and the arts – Ireland’s supposed national soft superpowers.
Travelling back and forth to Germany has only heightened his awareness of the gap between official Irish rhetoric and actual cultural spending.
At a recent event with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra – just one of many top-drawer ensembles in Germany – Brophy learned it had an annual budget, including fees and salaries, of €25 million. Ireland’s National (formerly RTÉ) Symphony Orchestra could only dream of such a figure.
“I know so many musicians struggling in Ireland who live with their parents and say ‘I could play a wedding and earn twice as much as playing with the NSO’.”
During the pandemic, which devastated many cultural venues and ensembles, Brophy finally got to read Ulysses and was struck by how many Joyce characters were well-versed in so-called “high” culture.
“It’s littered with working-class Dubs who know about Mozart’s operas. My grandad, a blue-collar Dub, knew the Chopin Military Polonaises,” he says. And today? Brophy sees Ireland at a cultural tipping point.
He credits Catherine Martin, Ireland’s last minister for culture, with prioritising larger arts budgets. But the money has yet to trickle down to any performers he knows – or to audiences in the form of subsidised arts access.
A quarter century ago Mary Harney delivered her famous Boston-or-Berlin speech, suggesting Ireland was, culturally and economically, closer to the US model than continental Europe.
Today, in the cultural sphere, Brophy says the country is “neither in Boston nor Berlin, it’s nowhere”, largely handing over culture to the free market without the necessary follow-though.
“I’ve worked with the Pittsburgh orchestra. Most of its $120 million budget comes from wealthy people who see the value of art and get huge tax incentives for their contributions,” he says. Not so in Ireland. “The Arts Council is keen to push this philanthropic model, but the State doesn’t match it with the right tax breaks.”
A century after independence, when Ireland swapped British colonialism for the Catholic clerical kind, Brophy thinks Ireland has handed itself over to global capital, ushering in a third wave of colonialism.
The State simultaneously earns a fortune from global companies based here, yet clings to old béal bocht (poor mouth) habits. Artists are expected to “don the green jersey” for minimal fees while the national symphony orchestra, when it goes on tour, still plays in Galway’s Leisureland swimming complex.
After conducting Mise Éire for an enthusiastic German audience, Brophy wonders why he feels that Ireland “is a sovereign nation yet, as country, feels transitory”.
“People need to assume a bit more agency over who we are and what we do in our country,” he said.
And by not demanding serious funding for culture, he says, “we are willingly depriving ourselves of the things that are good for us, good for our mental health and which make us uniquely ourselves.”
David Brophy and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra perform Songs of David Bowie, 3Arena on Sunday, March 2nd
Cologne calibre: Brophy following in big footsteps
The WDR Funkhausorchester was founded in 1947 in Cologne and is backed by the largest broadcaster in Germany’s public television network. Previous principal conductors have included Michail Jurowski and Wayne Marshall. This season the orchestra of 51 full-time musicians will play 38 concerts, all sold out, as well as additional records and film music dates.
